Oscar Iden Lecture Three: "The State of
Individuals"
Prof. Carroll Quigley
This is the most difficult of the three lectures I'm giving on
the history of the thousand years of the growth of public
authority. What happened in the last two hundred years is fairly
clear to me, but it is not easy to convey it to you, even those of
you who have had courses with me and are familiar with the
framework of much of my thinking. One reason for this difficulty,
of course, is the complexity of the subject itself, but after all,
the preceding eight hundred years were quite as complex as the last
two hundred years we will deal with this evening. A much more
fundamental reason for the difficulty is this: The reality of the
last two hundred years of the history of the history of Western
Civilization, including the history of our own country, is not
reflected in the general brainwashing you have received, in the
political mythology you have been hearing, or in the historiography
of the period as it exists today.
I will divide the period from 1776 to 1976 into two parts. The
first, to about 1890, was a period of expansion of industrial
society; the last eighty years, approximately, have been an age of
profound
crisis, not only in our own country, but in Western Civilization,
which is the unit in which I carry on my thinking on the subject.
In order to deal with this period, I have to go back to
fundamentals, and particularly to the fundamentals of human values,
and to do that, we must have paradigms.
The whole thousand years, as I explained in my first lecture, is a
shift from a society made up of communities in 976, to a society
today, where we have states of monstrous power and atomised
individuals. I will use certain definitions: A society is an
organization of persons and artefacts-- things made by people-- and
it's an organization to satisfy human needs. It would not exist if
it had not come into existence to satisfy human needs. Notice: I do
not say human desires. One of the striking things about our society
today is the remoteness of our desires from our needs. If you ask
anyone what he wants, what he desires, he will give you a list of
things which are as remote as can be from human needs. In our
society, the process we have been tracing for a thousand years is
the growth of the state. As I indicated in the first lecture, a
state is not the same thing as a society, although the Greeks and
the Romans thought it was. A state is an organization of
power on a territorial basis. The link between a society, whether
it be made up of communities or individuals, and a state is this:
Power rests on the ability to satisfy human needs.
Now I will put on the board something with which former students
are familiar. I always call it the levels of culture, the aspects
of a society: military, political, economic, social, emotional,
religious, and intellectual. Those are your basic human needs. The
interesting thing about them is that they are arranged in
evolutionary sequence. Millions of years ago, even before men
became human, they had a need for defence of the group, because it
is perfectly obvious that men cannot live outside of groups. They
can satisfy their needs only by cooperating within a group. But
I'll go further than that, and return to it again in a moment: Men
will not become men unless they grow up in communities. We will
come back to that because it is the basis of my lecture
tonight.
If you have a group, it must be defended against outsiders;
that's military. Before men came out of the trees they had that
need. If your needs are to be satisfied within some kind of group,
you must have ways of settling disputes and arguments, and
reconciling individual problems within the group; that's political.
You must have organizational patterns for satisfying material
needs, food, clothing, shelter: that's economic.
Then came two which have been largely been destroyed or
frustrated in the last thousand years of Western Civilization. Men
have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a
need to love and be loved. They have a need to be noticed. Sirhan
Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy because no one had ever noticed him
and he was determined that, from now on, someone would know he
existed. In fact, most of these "motiveless" assassinations are of
this type. Someone went up to the top of the University of Texas
tower and shot something like seventeen people before they caught
him. That was because no one had ever noticed him. People need
other people. That's the social need. The basis of social
relationships is reciprocity: if you cooperate with others, others
will cooperate with you.
The next is emotional need. Men must have emotional experiences.
This is obtained in two ways that I can see: moment to moment
relationships with other people--moment to moment-- and moment to
moment relationships with nature. Our society has so cluttered up
our lives with artefacts-- TV sets or automobiles or whatever-- and
organizational structures that moment to moment with nature are
almost impossible. Most people don't even know what the
weather outside is like. Someone said recently that until September
we had a great drought here in Washington, and four or five people
standing there said, "That's ridiculous." We had a shortage of
about eight inches of rain. Because they're in buildings, it
doesn't matter to them whether it's raining or not.
The next is the religious. It became fashionable in Western
Civilization, particularly in the last hundred years, to be
scornful of religion. But it is a fact that human beings have
religious needs. They have a need for a feeling of certitude in
their minds about things they cannot control and they do not fully
understand, and with humility, they will admit they do not
understand them. When you destroy people's religious expression,
they will establish secularised religions like Marxism.
Now, on the intellectual level: people have intellectual
needs. I used to tell students that Marilyn Monroe had
profound intellectual needs. And when no one would treat her as an
intellect or even as a potential intellect, for obvious reasons,
she was starved for intellectual experience. That's why she married
a man like Arthur Miller: she thought he was an intellectual.
All right, those are human needs. Power is the ability to
satisfy those needs. And someone who says that power is organised
force, or that power is the outcome of an election, or that power
is the ability to cut off our oil supply, has a completely
inadequate way of looking at it. My experience and study of the
destruction of civilizations and the collapse of great empires has
convinced me that empires and civilizations do not collapse because
of deficiencies on the military or the political levels. The Roman
army never met an army that was better than it was. But the Roman
army could not be sustained when all these things had collapsed and
no one cared. No one wanted to serve, no one wanted to pay taxes,
no one cared.
The other part of this will require you to put these things
together to some extent. Persons, personalities if you wish, can be
made only in communities. A community is made up of intimate
relationships among diverse types of individuals--a kinship group,
a local group, a neighbourhood, a village, a large family. Without
communities, no infant will be sufficiently socialized. He may grow
up to be forty years old, he may have made an extremely good
living, he may have engendered half a dozen children, but he is
still an infant unless he has been properly socialized and that
occurs in the first four or five years of life. In our society
today, we have attempted to throw the whole burden of socializing
out population upon the school system, to which the individual
arrives only at the age of four or five. A few years ago they had
big programs to take children to school for a few hours at age two
and three and four, but that will not socialize them. The first two
years are important. The way a child is treated in the first two
days is of vital importance. He has to be loved, above all he has
to be talked to. A state of individuals, such as we have now
reached in Western Civilization, will not create persons, and the
atomized individuals who make it up will be motivated by desires
which do not necessarily reflect needs. Instead of needing other
people they need a shot of heroin; instead of some kind of
religious conviction, they have to be with the winning team.
Human needs are the basis of power. The state, as I said, is a
power structure on a territorial basis, and the state will survive
only if it has sufficient ability to satisfy enough of these needs.
It is not enough for it to have organized force, and when a
politician says, "Elect me President and I will establish law and
order," he means organized force or power of other kinds. I won't
analyze this level; it's too complex and we don't have time. I will
simply say that the object of the political level is to legitimise
power: that is, to get people, in their minds, to recognize and
accept the actual power relationship in their society.
Next Tuesday a decision will be made as to who will be President
of the United States. That will not necessarily reflect the actual
power relationships in the United States at all. If all the people
who are intellectually frustrated would vote, the result might be
quite different. Many of you come to these lectures because you are
intellectually frustrated, and you want to be exposed again to my
insistent demands that you think about things. For example, we no
longer have intellectually satisfying arrangements in our
educational system, in our arts, humanities or anything else;
instead we have slogans and ideologies. An ideology is a religious
or emotional expression; it is not an intellectual expression. So
when a society is reaching its end, in the last couple of centuries
you have what I call misplacement of satisfactions. You find your
emotional satisfaction in making a lot of money, or in being
elected to the White House in 1972, or in proving to the poor,
half-naked people of Southeast Asia that you can kill them in large
numbers.
The state is a good state if it is sovereign and if it is
responsible. It is more or less incidental whether a state is, for
example, democratic. If democracy reflects the structure of power
in the society, then the state should be democratic. But if the
pattern of power in a society is not democratic, then you cannot
have a democratic state. This is what happens in Latin America,
Africa and places like that, when you have an election and the army
doesn't like the man who is elected, so they move in and throw him
out. The outcome of the election does not reflect the power
situation, in which the dominant thing is organized force. When I
say governments have to be responsible, I'm saying the same thing
as when I said they have to be legitimate: they have to reflect the
power structure of the society. Politics is the area for
establishing responsibility by legitimising power, that is, somehow
demonstrating the power structure to people, and it may take a
revolution, such as the French Revolution, and it may take a war,
like the American Civil War. In the American Civil War, for
example, the structure of power in the United States was
such--perhaps unfortunately, I don't know-- that the South could
not leave unless the North was willing. It was that simple. But it
took a war to prove it.
I defined sovereignty last time, but I want to run through it
for the benefit of those who weren't here. Sovereignty has eight
aspects: DEFENSE; JUDICIAL, settling disputes; ADMINISTRATIVE,
discretionary actions for the public need; TAXATION, mobilizing
resources: this is one of the powers the French government didn't
have in 1770; LEGISLATION. The finding of rules and the
establishment of rules through promulgation and statue; EXECUTIVE,
the enforcement of laws and judicial decisions. Then there are two
which are of absolute paramount importance today: MONETARY, the
creation and control of money and credit--if that is not an aspect
of the public sovereignty, then the state is far less than fully
sovereign; and the eight one, THE INCORPORATING POWER, the right to
say that an association of people is a fictitious person with the
right to hold property and to sue in the courts. Notice: the
federal government of the United States today does not have the
seventh and eight but I'll come back to that later.
In the meantime, I'm still on my introduction for this evening,
and I want to discuss what happened in the last thousand years. If
we go back before 976, when you had communities, the main core of
people's life and experience, which controlled their behaviour and
determined their lives--controls and rewards, I call it--was in the
religious, emotional and social levels. They had religious beliefs,
they social and emotional relationships with the people they saw
every day. That was the core of their lives. The significant thing
is that those controls and rewards were internalised: they were
what was acquired very largely in the first four or five years of
life. When a child is born, he is nor a person, he is a human
being. He is utterly potential. When someone becomes a personality,
such as you or myself, then he has traits, which were acquired out
of his potentialities as the result of experience over numerous
years.
This is why they could get along without a state in 976: all the
significant controls were internalised. I took the year 976
because, although Western Civilization had come into existence
about two hundred years before that, it began to expand in 976. By
that I mean they began to produce more goods per person per day per
year. You know what I mean by expansion if you took my freshman
course: increased output per capita, increased knowledge, increased
geographic area for the civilization itself, and increased
population. That began in 976, and we'll put an arrow here at the
economic level to indicate it. The economic expansion was achieved
chiefly by specialization and exchange: instead of each little
group's trying to satisfy all its own needs, groups began to
concentrate and, for example, produce wool and exchange it for
other things. That process of increasing specialization and
exchange, which is the basis of expansion in our civilization, I
call
commercialization. As long as the society is expanding, that
process of commercialisation will continue as it has for a thousand
years in our society, so that today everything is commercialised,
politics, religion, education, ideology, belief, the armed
services. Practically everything is commercialised; everything has
its price.
When this expansion reaches a crisis, you get increasing
politicisation. I won't go into the details of this. It can be
explained in detail, as most of you, perhaps, know. Politicization
means that the expansion is slowing up, and you are no longer
attempting to achieve increased output per capita, or increased
wealth, or increased satisfactions, or whatever is motivating you,
by economic expansion, but you are doing so by mobilizing power. We
have seen this going on in our society for almost a century.
And then, as the society continues and does not reform, you get
increased militarisation. You can certainly see that process
in Western Civilization and in the history of the United States. In
the last forty years our society has been drastically militarized.
It isn't yet as militarized as other societies and other periods
have been; we still have a long way to go in this direction. Our
civilization has a couple of centuries to go, I would guess. Things
are moving faster than they did in any civilization I ever knew
before this one, but we probably will have another century or
two.
As this process goes on, you get certain other things. I've
hinted at a number of them. One is misplacement of satisfactions.
You find your satisfactions--your emotional satisfaction, your
social satisfaction-- not in moment to moment relationships with
nature or other people, but with power, or with wealth, or even
with organized force--sadism, in some cases: Go out and murder a
lot of people in a war, a just war, naturally.
The second thing that occurs as this goes on is increasing
remoteness of desires from needs. I've mentioned this. The next
thing is an increasing confusion between means and ends. The ends
are the human needs, but if I asked people what these needs are,
they can hardly tell me. Instead they want the means they have been
brainwashed to accept, that they think will satisfy their needs.
But it's perfectly obvious that the methods that we have been using
are not working. Never was any society in human history as rich and
as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States, and it
is not a happy society. Just this week, I looked at a book called
"The Joyless Economy", by an economist, Tibor Scitovsky, who
diagrammed some of these things.
In the final aspect of this process, controls on behaviour shift
from the intermediate levels of human experience--social, emotional
and religious--to the lower, military and political, or to the
upper, ideological. They become the externalized controls of a
mature society: weapons, bureaucracies, material rewards, or
ideology. Customary conformity is replaced by conscious
decision-making, and this usually implies a shift from your own
conformity to someone else's decision. In its final stages, the
civilization becomes a dualism of almost totalitarian imperial
power and an amorphous mass culture of atomized individuals.
All of this is for the sake of establishing a few paradigms.
What happened in the last two hundred years? In 1776, Western
Civilization was approaching a revolutionary situation. A
revolutionary situation is one in which the structure of
power--real power--is not reflected in the structure of law,
institutions, and conventional arrangements. Law and legal
arrangements, including constitutional structures, were not
legitimate in much of Western Civilization in 1776. They were not
responsible because they did not reflect power. Whether it was the
English Parliament, which had a legal right to rule America; or the
nightmarish constitution of France, which no longer reflected the
structure in French society in any way; or, east of the Rhine, the
enlightened despotisms, the laws of the polity did not reflect the
power structure of Europe at all, as Napoleon very soon showed
them. This, therefore, is a revolutionary situation.
Let's look a little more closely at these.
In England, the laws of the polity established control of the
country in an oligarchy of landowners, the Whig oligarchy. Members
of the House of Commons were sent to Parliament by pieces of land,
and anyone who owned a piece of land with the right to send a
member to Parliament, could do so whether anyone lived on the piece
of land or not. It was not a reflection of the power structure of
England to say that pieces of land were powerful. I do not have to
demonstrate to you that the legal arrangements by which the British
Parliament made rules to govern life in the United States were
equally unrealistic.
I'll leave France for a moment and go east of the Rhine. In
Central Europe we had what was called Enlightened Despotism: small
principalities ruled by despots who had a legal right to say, "This
will happen; that will happen; something else will happen." In the
period from 1776 onward, for about twenty-five years, they tried to
establish a more rational life in their principalities, but they
couldn't do it. Their system of weights and measures--I won't
attempt to describe them to you--were absolute, unholy chaos. They
had a different weight or measurement for every commodity and those
measurements changed as you went from village to village or from
district to district. They also had been changing in size for
hundreds of years, because the power of the creditors was so great
that, if you owed a bushel of wheat to your landlord, all the
landlords together, over generations, could make the bushel a
larger measure.
I discussed Eastern Europe adequately in my last lecture. I'll
simply point out that in this period Poland disappeared, because
the Polish landlord class would rather keep their serfs than be
politically independent. They were unwilling to organize a modern
army with modern weapons and modern military training to defend
Poland against outside enemies, such as Prussia, Russia or Austria.
As a result, those three got together and divided up Poland in
1795, so Poland no longer existed. Under Napoleon there was a Grand
Duchy of Warsaw, but Poland did not exist again until 1919.
In France, as I described to you last week, the polity had
reached a condition of total paralysis. The government did not have
sovereignty. It did not have the taxing power; it did not have the
legislative power; it did not have the incorporating power; it did
not have the judicial power; it did not have most of the eight
aspects of sovereignty I've mentioned to you. And in 1776 the
government became aware of this, when they tried to abolish the
guilds and could not do so, because under the law they could not be
abolished unless their debts were paid. The government could not
pay their debts because it did not have the taxing power. And it
didn't have the taxing power because it didn't have the judicial
power: if it took someone to court, the judges would say, "No, you
have no right to examine his income. You can ask him what he has
been paying for the last couple of hundred years on that piece of
property or whatever it is."
The result was the explosion of the French Revolution, which
produced, by the time of Napoleon, let's say 1805, the most
sovereign state in Europe. Notice: Napoleon was an enlightened
despot, the last one in Europe. Anyone who says, as Robert Palmer,
for instance, that France was leading the parade in 1789 in terms
of government and public authority, just doesn't know what he's
talking about. In 1789 France was bringing up the absolute rear as
far as public authority and sovereignty were concerned. That is why
France gets its enlightened despot so late. He wasn't
even a Frenchman; he was an Italian; and he imposed an Italian
government on France. Because it was so rational, so powerful, so
well-organized, and the new sovereignty was embodied in a new
entity, the nation, it had a power which made it possible foe
Napoleon to conquer almost all of Europe. He was, however,
ultimately defeated, as most conquerors of all Europe have been
throughout history: William II in 1918, Hitler in 1945, Phillip II
in the sixteenth century, Henry V of England the early fifteenth
century, and so forth.
By 1820, after the Napoleonic system had been replaced, all four
of these geographical zones I have mentioned were unstable, but
they were much more stable and much more legitimate then they had
been in 1776. Now, although I say that in 1820 they were
fundamentally not that stable, we know there was political
stability in Europe for at least three generations after that date,
until at least the 1860's. There was a brief war in 1866 but I
won't go into that. The stability of Europe from 1815 to 1855 is
something on which we now look with nostalgia. The reasons for this
apparent stability had nothing to do with the structure of the
state, except the degree to which
the structure of the state had become sufficiently rationalized and
sovereign through the period of revolution from 1776 to about 1820.
With additional events, the situation looked like stability, and
these additional events produced a new Age of Expansion.
The first of these was the expansion of technology, including
the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. The Agricultural
Revolution of about 1720 and onward made it possible to produce
more and more food from land with less and less labour. The
Industrial Revolution began about 1750 and was the application of
inanimate energy to the production on a large scale. (Incidentally,
1776 is a very significant year, and this is not just because the
American Revolution began during it. Watt's patent of the steam
engine was in 1776; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published in
1776; the failure of the French to reorganise their political
system occurred in 1776, and so forth.) The disruption of
communities, the destruction of religion and the frustration of
emotions were greatly intensified by the Industrial Revolution:
railroads, factories, growth of cities, technological revolution in
the countryside and in the growing of food, and so forth.
The appearance of stability in the nineteenth century Age of
Expansion was also due to the externalisation of rewards and
controls. This eventually brought on an acceleration of the main
focus of the main focus of the activities of the society downward
again to the levels of culture, from the areas of internal controls
to the areas of external controls. If you can be bought, with a
higher salary, to go to San Diego and give up all your friends and
associations, that is an external control. If you can be forced to
go there by the draft, that is militarization.
Another thing which became very obvious in the nineteenth
century was the increasing role of propaganda for the purpose of
changing people's ways of looking at society, and the success of
this propaganda helped to create an impression of stability. At the
beginning of the lecture, I offended some of you by saying you had
been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of
fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if
he is to become a
very mature individual, he has been brainwashed. That is, he
has been given a structure for categorizing his experience and a
system of values applied to that structure of categories. But in
our society, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this has
now become a propagandist system in which emphasis is put on the
future: Think only of the future. This is the ideology against
which the young people of the 1950's and 1960's rebelled. Future
preference: plan; study
hard; save. All the things I used to hear from my maiden aunts:
"Wise bees save honey; wise boys save money," and they each
secretly gave me a dollar as I was leaving. "A penny saved is a
penny earned." "A stitch in time....." Everything that's in "Poor
Richard", the Benjamin Franklin propaganda machine.
Another aspect of this nineteenth century propaganda system is
the increasing emphasis upon material desires. If you had the
material things you wanted --a nice house in the suburbs, a
swimming pool, a couple of big cars, a place in the country, a
motor boat, a trailer to take it back and forth--you should be
happy and satisfied. Now it's endless--a pocket computer, citizens'
band radio, whatever you want.
A third idea we were brainwashed into believing was that the
only important thing was individualism. They called it freedom.
There is no such thing as freedom. There is something called
liberty; it's quite different. I'll not spend much time on this. If
you're interested, read Ruggiero's "History of European
Liberalism", Oxford University Press, 1927, particularly the first
couple of chapters. That's the English translation of an Italian
book. Freedom is freedom from restraints. We're always under
restraints. The difference between a stable society and an unstable
one is that the restraints in an unstable one are external. In a
stable society, government ultimately becomes unnecessary ; the
restraints on people's actions are internal, there're self
disciplined, they are the restraints you have accepted because they
make it possible for you to satisfy all your needs to the degree
that is good for you.
Another thing that they have brainwashed us into believing in
the last 150 years is that quantitative change is superior to any
qualitative attributes. In other words, if we can turn out more
automobiles this year than last, it doesn't matter if they're half
as good. The same is true of everything. We are quantifying
everything, and this is why we are trying to put everything on
computers. Governments no longer have to make decisions; computers
will do it.
Another thing they have succeeded in doing is to give us
vicarious satisfactions for many of our frustrations. It is
unbelievable to see how the American people are hung up on
vicarious experiences: television, movies, mass spectator sports.
You have no idea what the small towns of America are like on Friday
nights, like this, when the local high school football or
basketball team is engaged in competition with their neighbour
eighteen miles away. And what a gloomy place the chapel or church
is Sunday if they lose-- it won't matter if it rains. People need
exercise; they do not need to watch other people exercise,
particularly people who already had too much exercise. Another
vicarious satisfaction is the sexy magazines; this is vicarious
sex. To anyone rushing to buy one, I'd like to say, "The real thing
is better."
The brainwashing which has been going on for 150 years has also
resulted in the replacement of intellectual activities and religion
by ideologies and science. It is hardly possible to discuss the
problems of the historical past without running up against Marxist
interpretations. I have nothing against Marx, except that his
theories do not explain what happened, and this, to me, is a fatal
defect. The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between
science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method
for investigating experience, and religion is something quite
different. Religion is the fundamental, necessary
internalisation of our system of more permanent values.
Another thing they have tried to get us to believe in the last
150 years-- and the idea is now dying in front of us-- is the myth
that the nation as the repository of sovereignty can be both a
state and a community. This is the great ideological innovation of
the French revolution, you see. The nation can be the repository of
sovereignty. But suppose weapons in a society are such that it is
possible for a government to impose its will over an area a
thousand miles across. And suppose that in that thousand mile area
there are a number of nations, such as the Bretons, Catalonians,
the Welsh, the Lithuanians. These are as much nations as the ones
that somehow or other became the embodiments of sovereignty in the
nineteenth century. Why did the English, the French, the
Castilians, the Hohenzollerns, and others become the repository of
sovereignty as nations: (notice: they missed out in the whole
Balkan and Danube areas.) They did so because, at that time,
weapons made it possible to compel obedience over areas which were
approximately the same size as these national groups I have
mentioned. As a result, they were able to crush out other
nationalisms, such as the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, the
Catalonians-- who had a much longer and more cultured history than
the Castilians-- the Provencals, and many others. In other words,
nationalism is an episode in history, and it fit a certain power
structure and a certain configuration of human life in our
civilization. Now what's happening? They all want autonomy. The
Scots think they can get their independence and control oil in the
North Sea, and then England will become a colonial area for
Edinburgh. And so forth.
In 1820, thus, the state was essentially unstable, in spite of
appearances. It was not fully sovereign. For example, it did not
have the control of money and credit in most places; it did not
have control of corporations in most places. It was not stable
because the nation is not a satisfactory community. The very idea
that, because everyone who speaks French is in the same nation and,
in the nineteenth century, in the same state, they must therefore
be in the same community, is just not true. The nation or the
state, as we now have it in terms of the structure of power, cannot
be a community.
Another thing which may serve to point out the instability of
the power system of the state: the individual cannot be made the
basic unit of a society, as we have tried to do, or of the state,
since the internalisation of controls must be the preponderant
influence in any stable society. Even in a society in which it
appears that all power is in the hands of the government --Soviet
Russia, let's say-- at least eighty percent of all human behaviour
is regulated by internalised controls socialized in the people by
the way they were treated from the moment they were born. As a
result, they have come to accept certain things that allow the
Russian state to act as if it can do anything, when it obviously
can't and knows it can't. Notice the new Russian budget announced
this week: as a result of our pouring our food surpluses into
Russia, they are now going to increase the consumption of their
expenditures.
Also related to the problem of internalised controls is the
shift of weapons in our society. This is a profound problem. I have
spent ten years working on it throughout all of history, and I hope
eventually to produce a book if I can find a publisher. There will
be endless analyses of Chinese history, Byzantine history and
Russian history and everything else, and the book is about
nine-tenths written. I'd say in the last ten years the shift of
weapons in any civilization and, above all, in our civilization,
from shock weapons to missile weapons has a dominant influence on
the ability to control individuals: individuals cannot be
controlled by missile weapons. Notice that if you go back several
hundred years to the Middle Ages, all weapons were shock, that is,
you came at the enemy with a spear or a sword. Even as late as
1916, in the First World War, you came at the Germans with bayonets
after a preliminary barrage with artillery. But we have now shifted
almost completely to missile weapons. Missile weapons are weapons
that you hurl. You may shoot, you may have bombs dropped from an
airplane, you may throw a hand grenade: these are missile weapons.
The essential difference between a shock weapon and a missile
weapon is this: a missile weapon is either fired or it isn't fired.
It cannot be half-fired. Once you let it go, it's out of your
control. It is a killing weapon. But a shock weapon--a billy club
or a bayonet-- can be used to any degree you wish. If you say to
someone, "Get up and get out of my room," and you pull out a
machines gun, or you call in a B-52 bomber, or you pull the pin in
a hand grenade....But with a bayonet you can persuade him.
In our society, individual behaviour can no longer be controlled
by any system of weaponry we have. In fact, we do not have enough
people, even if we equip them with shock weapons, to control the
behaviour of that part of the population which does not have
internalised controls. One reason for that, of course, is that the
twenty percent who do have internalised controls are concentrated
in certain areas. I won't go into the subject of controls. It opens
up the whole field of guerrilla resistance, terrorism, and
everything else; these cannot be controlled by any system or
organized structure or force that exists, at least on the basis of
missile weaponry. And, as I said, it would take too many people on
the basis of shock weaponry. We have now done what the Romans did
when they started to commit suicide: we have shifted from an
army of citizens to an army of mercenaries, and those mercenaries
are being recruited in our society, as they were in Roman society,
from the twenty percent of the population which does not have the
internalised controls of the civilization.
The appearance of stability from 1840 to about 1900 was
superficial, temporary and destructive in the long run, because, as
I have said, you must have communities, and communities and
societies must rest upon cooperation and not on competition. Anyone
who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying
to maximise his own greed is talking total nonsense. All the
history of human society shows that it's nonsense. And to teach it
in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of
life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become
the basis of any society or any community.
The economic and technological achievements of industrialization
in this period were fundamentally mistaken. This could get quite
technical; I'll try not to. The economic expansion of
industrialization has been based on plundering the natural capital
of the globe that was created over millions of years: the
plundering of the soils of their fertility; the plundering of the
human
communities whether they were our own or someone else's, in Africa
or anywhere else; the plundering of the forest. In 1776 the wealth
of forest in North America was beyond belief; within 150 years, it
has been destroyed and more than ninety percent of it wasted. And
it had in it three hundred years of accumulated capital savings and
investment of sunlight and the fertility of the soil. (And now our
that our bread is going to have five times as much fiber by being
made out of sawdust, we're going to have to go on plundering the
forests to an even larger degree; this, I am sure, is one of the
reasons why two days ago President Ford signed the new bill
allowing clear cutting in the National Forests. We need that
roughage or fiber in our bread, we have taken out all the natural
fiber of the wheat, of course, and thrown it away.)
The energy which gave us the Industrial Revolution--coal, oil,
natural gas--represented the accumulated savings of four weeks of
sunlight that managed somehow to be saved in the earth out of the
three billion years of sunshine. That is what the fossil fuels are.
This is not income to be spent; this is capital to be saved and
invested. But we have already destroyed into entropy--a form of
energy which is no longer able to be utilized-- eleven or twelve
days of that accumulated twenty-eight days of sunlight. And we have
wasted it.
The fundamental, all pervasive cause of world instability today
is the destruction of communities by the commercialisation of all
human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses. The
technological acceleration of transportation, communication and
weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing
political structures. We still have at least half a dozen political
structures in Europe, but our technology and the power system of
Western Civilization today are such that most of Europe should be a
single power system. This creates instability.
Medical science and the population explosion have continued to
produce more and more people when the supply of food and the supply
of jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, not only in the
United States, but everywhere, because the whole purpose of using
fossil fuels in the corporate structure is to eliminate jobs.
"Labour saving," we call it, as if there were something wrong with
working. Working is one of the joys of life. And if we created a
society in which working is a pain in the neck, then we have
created a society which is not fit for human beings. It will be
obvious to you that I have enjoyed my work, although at the end of
my career I have no conviction that I did any good. Fortunately, I
had a marvellous father and a marvellous mother, and we were taught
you don't have to win, but you have to give it all you've got. Then
it won't matter.
To get back to sovereignty and the structure of the state,
another cause of today's instability is that we now have a society
in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated
by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the
state structure: control of credit and banking and the corporation.
These are free of political controls and social responsibility, and
they have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in
American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate
land, labour, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything
else the economists once told us were the chief elements of
production. The only element of production they are concerned with
is the one they can control: capital
So now everything is capital intensive, including medicine, and
it hasn't worked. I'll give you just one example. No one has a more
capital intensive medical system than the United States and many of
you may be well satisfied with it. I simply want to point out a
couple of facts. When a baby boy is born in the United State, his
expectation of life is less than in nineteen other countries in the
world. And it's that good only because our infant mortality rate is
better than our adult mortality rate. In other words, in infant
mortality we are about ninth or tenth; these figures date from
about 1972, I think. Now let us look at a ten year old boy in the
United States today. His expectation of life is less than that in
thirty other countries, according to the United Nations statistics.
We pay more than the people in any of those thirty countries for a
capital intensive medical system devoted to keeping people who are
almost dead alive a few more days, instead of making people grow up
healthy by teaching them that work is fun, by teaching then that
they don't have to be gluttons--in the United States, more than
half of our food is wasted, maybe because it isn't that good.
Exercise, moderation and so forth-- it's all the old stuff we used
to get in Sunday school. It just happens to be correct.
Our agricultural system is another cause of instability. It used
to be a system in which seed was put into the earth to create food
by taking sunlight, rain and the wealth of the soil, but we have
replaced it with an agricultural system which is entirely capital
intensive. We have eliminated labour and have even eliminated land
to a considerable extent, so that we now pour out what we call
food, but it's really a chemical synthetic. We have done this by
putting a larger and larger amount of chemical fertilizers and
pesticides made from fossil fuels into a smaller and smaller amount
of soil. To give you one figure: Every bushel of corn we send to
the Russians represents one gallon of gasoline, and then they tell
us that, by selling our grain to the Russians, we're getting the
foreign exchange that will allow us to pay for petroleum at
fourteen dollars a barrel. No one has stopped to ask how many
gallons were used to grow the grain and send it to the
Russians.
In the thirty years from 1940 to 1970, three million American
farms were abandoned because the families who worked them could not
compete with the corporate farmers using the new chemical methods
of producing crops. Thirty million people left these abandoned
farms and the rural areas and went into the towns and cities,
millions of them to get on relief. In 1970, the last year for which
I have reliable figures, two thousand farms a year were going out
of production. These are the farms on which we brought up our
grandparents, the people who won the civil war, indeed, the people
who fought in the First World War, and, in many cases, even in the
Second War. Will the tractors be able to fight the next war when
there are no farm boys to fight? (Of course, whether there are farm
boys or not, they won't want to fight.)
In a similar way, by urban renewal and other things, we are
destroying communities in the cities. Much of the legislation of
the last forty years in this country has been aimed at the
destruction of families, ghettos, parishes and any other
communities.
All these processes create frustrations on every level of human
experience and result in the instability and disorder we see around
every day.
Now I come to a topic of delicacy: the United States
constitutional crisis. The three branches of government set up in
1789 do not contain the eight aspects of sovereignty. The
Constitution completely ignores, for example, the administrative
power. The result is that the three branches of government have
been struggling ever since to decide which of them will control the
administrative power. The growth of political parties was necessary
to establish relationships among the three branches. I used to tell
my students that the important thing in any election is the
nomination. And when you come to the election, it doesn't matter
who votes, what's important is who didn't vote. Elections in the
United States are increasingly decided by people who didn't vote
because they're turned off for various reasons.
As a result of the way the three branches were set up, each has
tried to go outside the sphere in which it should be restrained.
For example, walking over here with Dean Krogh and Professor Brown,
I spoke briefly about the Boston Latin School I attended. It is the
oldest school in the United States, founded in 1635 as a
preparatory school. Harvard was created the next year as a place
for Latin School boys to go to college, and in my day, 1929-1930,
it was the largest single source of supply for Harvard, although
Harvard was doing all it could to cut down on the number of Latin
School boys. The chief method they used to keep us out was to raise
the entrance requirements, but we could handle that. Today that
school is controlled by a Boston judge who has taken it upon
himself to tell the school who will be admitted. And he has said
they must have so many girls, they must have such a percentage of
blacks, they cannot have entrance exams, and if people fail they
can't throw them out. And what was once an absolutely incredible
preparatory school is now being destroyed. It had many
drawbacks--it was murderous. But it could get students through any
competitive system of entrance exams in the country.
Another aspect of our constitutional crisis can be summed up in
what young Schlesinger--that's Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.-- called the
Imperial Presidency. When I look at the President of the United
States, what I see is Caesar Augustus. He is commander-in-chief;
that's what Imperator, Emperor, means. He's the head of the
executive branch. He's the head of state, which means he is the
representative of the United States government in all foreign
affairs and all ambassadors are accredited to him. Fourthly, he's
the head of his political party. Fifth, he's head of the
administrative system, which is increasingly making all the
decisions as to what will be spent and who will spend it. Do you
know who is making the decisions in our Bureau of Management and
Budget as to who will get how much? And the president is also the
symbol of national unity, the focus of our emotional feeling
regarding our country. This is why it is so difficult to get rid of
an incumbent President either by election or impeachment.
We have today a general paralysis of government in the United
States, especially in the administrative power, by the very thing
we praise most: the so-called rule of law, which should rather be
called the rule of lawyers. Let me give you one example. It is
perfectly clear in the Constitution that a President can be
impeached by a vote of Congress: indictment by the House,
conviction by the Senate. This does not require common law
procedures; it does not require judicial process. It is not a
judicial action at all. It is a simple political action. If you
have the votes, he can be removed, simply by counting them. The
horrible thing about the whole Nixon business is that impeachment
will never again be used in the history of the United States,
because every member of the judiciary Committee has to be a lawyer,
and the Judiciary committee has to recommend impeachment. And they
require all kinds of procedures you would use in a court of law if
you were accused of holding up a bank. The result is that never
again will anyone try to impeach a President. It would take years
and be indecisive, when you could simply have taken a vote and had
the whole thing done in one morning.
There are a lot of other things in the Constitution which are
perfectly obvious, but you can't get any constitutional lawyer to
agree with one of them. It's perfectly obvious, for example, that
if the three branches of government cannot agree to do something,
it shouldn't be done. That was the theory behind the Constitution.
No--we have someone supreme: the court will make the ultimate
decision.
I'll just touch on something else: secrecy in government.
Secrecy in government exists for only one reason: to prevent the
American people from knowing what's going on. It is nonsense to
believe that anything our government does is not known to the
Russians at about the moment it happens.
To me, the most ominous flaw in our constitutional set-up is the
fact that the federal government does not have control over of
money and credit and does not have control of corporations. It is
therefore not really sovereign. And it is not really responsible,
because it is now controlled by these two groups, corporations, and
those who control the flows of money. The new public financing of
the Presidential elections is arranged so that they can spend as
much as they want: voluntary contributions, not authorized by the
candidate, are legal.
The administrative system and elections are dominated today by
the private power of money flows and corporation activities. I want
to read you a summary from James Willard Hurst, "The Legitimacy of
the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States from 1780
to 1970". He points out that there was powerful anti-corporation
feeling in the United States in the 1820's. Therefore, it was
established by the states that corporations could not exist by
prescription: they had to have charters. They had to have a limited
term of life and not be immortal. Corporations today are immortal:
if they get charters, they can live forever and bury us all. They
had to have a limited purpose. Who is giving us this bread made of
sawdust? ITT: International Telephone and Telegraph, the same
corporation that drove Ivar Kreuger to suicide in Paris in April
1931, when it actually was an international telegraph corporation,
controlled by J P. Morgan.
I won't take time to read all these things, but certain thin
regulations were established in the United States regarding
corporations: restricted purpose and activities especially by banks
and insurance companies; prohibition on one corporation's holding
the stock of another without specific statutory grant; limits on
the span of the life of the corporation, requiring recurrent
legislative scrutiny; limits on total assets; limits on new issues
of capital, so that the proportion of control of existing
stockholders could be maintained; limits on the votes allowed to
any stockholder, regardless of the size of his holding; and so
forth.
By 1890 all of these had been destroyed by judicial
interpretation which extended to corporations---fictitious
persons-- those constitutional rights guaranteed, especially by the
Fifteenth Amendment, to living persons. This interpretation was
made possible by Roscoe Conklin, known as "Turkey Strut Conklin,"
who told the Supreme Court that there were no records kept by the
committee of the Senate that had drawn up the Fifteenth Amendment.
But he had kept private notes which showed they had the intended
word "person" to include corporations. It was most convenient. The
corporation that was hiring him to do this suitably rewarded
him.
Now I come to my last statement. I regret ending on what is, I
suppose, such a pessimistic note-- I'm not personally pessimistic.
The final result will be that the American people will ultimately
prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system.
Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed
people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this
bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would
assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The
process of coping out will take a long time, but notice: we are
already coping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are
already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. I heard an
estimate tonight that the President will probably be chosen by
forty percent of the people eligible to vote for the forth time in
sixteen years. People are also copping out by refusing to pay any
attention to newspapers or to what's going on in the world, and by
increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in
their own neighbourhoods.
In this pathetic election, I am simply amazed that neither of
the candidates has thought about any of the important issues, such
as localism, the rights of areas to make their own decisions about
those things affecting them. Now I realise that if there's a
sulphur mine or a sulphur factory a few miles away, localism isn't
much help. But I think you will find one extraordinary thing in
this election: a considerable number of people will go to the polls
and vote for the local candidates,
But will not vote for the President. That is a reverse of the
situation fifty years ago.
Now I want to say good night. Do not be pessimistic. Life goes
on; life is fun. And if a civilization crashes, it deserves to.
When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, "Create our own
communities."
Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen.